


the weight of family and the pull of gravity

by sophieispro



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Family, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 03:09:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12289947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophieispro/pseuds/sophieispro
Summary: The man doesn’t speak. He only stares, dispassionate, a statue made of crumbling marble. Waiting, she realises.She swallows thickly, and she’s sure he can hear the nervous intake of breath through the whistling winds and thudding rain on the roof. She wills her voice to be steady.Rey tells him, “I’m your daughter.”





	the weight of family and the pull of gravity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [randomfatechidna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomfatechidna/gifts).



> so I legit just wrote star wars fanfic for a creative writing for English class and I just went find/replace. this is un-beta'd so tell me if there are any mistakes
> 
> (also I don't even think Rey is related to Luke but I love family tropes sooooo)

_"You try your hardest to leave the past alone._  
_This crooked posture is all you’ve ever known._  
_It is the consequence of living in between_  
_The weight of family and the pull of gravity."_

 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to wait?” says the gruff, old man, as raindrops coat his wiry hair and line the wrinkles of his face, “You don’t want to be out here all alone.”

 

The girl steps out of the boat, lurching dangerously as the tempest thrashes against its metal body, icy salt water spraying her ankles - not that it has an effect, the furious rain has already clung to her now-blue skin and crawled its way into every crevice. The muscle memory of the swaying boat with still echoes through her bones, unsteady on her feet, like a child learning to walk for the first time.

 

“Go,” she tells him, “I don’t plan on leaving for a long time.”

 

She watches him leave, a tiny white-grey blip on the thundering horizon, the sea so dark it bleeds into the swirling storm above. The world is a hurricane, spitting icy fury, blanketing the night sky in thick, starless clouds. The harsh, Welsh winds bite with iron teeth at her exposed face while the rain continues to attack, relentless, a barrage of sleet and white-water.

 

Her boots squelch against the muddy path, every sure step leading her closer to closure. An end. The final chapter of her mystery. The girl has no name. The girl has no past. No story but the one waiting. For her to uncover, to rip off the misty, forgotten veil, to reach out and grab hold of her future.

 

Through the gale, she sees a cottage, solitary, almost invisible in the raging night. A pale light shines through the dusty window, somehow filling her soddened bones with warmth, even as the violent storm beats and pounds against the trembling glass. It feels like home. Dry. Light. Golden.

 

It feels like completion.

 

She trudges up the hill to the rickety, weathered cottage, and raps her knuckles against its aching wood. She waits. And waits. Perhaps the crying storm rendered her tentative knocks silent, she wonders. As she raises her hand to knock again, the door creaks open slowly, as if it is shy, until the thin sliver of a pale-yellow glow illuminates the rain, caught in a dazzling trap as light splinters through the air.

 

The man standing in the doorway is as weathered as his cottage. His whispery, silver hair begins to catch raindrops, while his face is defined by the crinkled crevices of tiredness. She does not register how old he looks, how worn and battered, like an eroded stone, beaten by the wild winds of winter and the soft kiss of spring. She only notices his eyes. Blue. Clear as the sapphire sky. Like the tumultuous sea crashing against a mirror.

 

The man doesn’t speak. He only stares, dispassionate, a statue made of crumbling marble. _Waiting,_ she realises.

 

She swallows thickly, and she’s sure he can hear the nervous intake of breath through the whistling winds and thudding rain on the roof. She wills her voice to be steady.

 

Rey tells him, “I’m your daughter.”

  


***

 

Rey never remembered her mother. There was a misty void where she should’ve been, as if Rey was reaching for something just beyond her eyes, yet it disappeared just before she could grab it. A mother seemed unrealistic. Foreign. A fairytale.

 

She remembered her father, however. Not much, just murky fragments, blurred around the edges and viewed through a fuzzy, sepia film.The upturned lips of a smile. Kind, blue eyes. Windchime laughter. Soaring into the air, free and flying, before being caught again by a set of comforting, muscular arms.

 

She remembered being loved by him. She remembered being abandoned by him.

 

Rey was raised by her aunt, who shared her brother’s radiant warmth but not his quite, placid demeanour. Aunt Leia was a tempest. Earthquakes followed in her footsteps and split the ground as she walked. She carried righteous thunder wherever she went. When she spoke, the world shook. If her father was the peaceful springtime breeze, Aunt Leia was the summer storm.

 

It did not mean Aunt Leia was any less loving, no - she loved with a scalding fury. She loved her brother, and she loved Rey like her own. But in Leia, the remnants of her twin still echoed, like a distorted recording. His absence was a gaping wound in their house, a hole that could never be filled, not by Rey’s blurred memories or Leia’s luminous love.

 

He disappeared. No warning. No evidence but a hastily written note on a scrap of paper - _I am so sorry._ He vanished like a ghost, fading into daybreak. Rey pestered her aunt, begging for any crumbs of information about the enigma of her father, an answer to a mystery, waiting to be discovered.

 

“You were too young to remember,” Leia explained, as she sat Rey down. She was fourteen, and it had been a decade since her father vanished into vapour, “Luke was a troubled man.”

 

The pieces fit over the years, Rey pasted every shred of evidence together - a traumatised war veteran, an accidental child, a mental breakdown. The story unfolded for her as Leia spoke, one detail at a time. It blossomed and grew, flowering uncontrollably. The secret of her father bit onto her with iron teeth and refused to relinquish its vice-like grip.

 

It wasn’t enough to simply _know_ , Rey soon discovered. She needed an explanation. She needed a reason.

 

Why hadn’t he contacted her after all these years?

 

Where has he been?

 

Aunt Leia helped her track him down. They spent long nights, scanning and searching for his name, aided only by the glow of a computer screen and the bitterness of coffee. They found military friends, old acquaintances, previous employers.

 

A work colleague said he went on holiday to Thailand and never returned.

 

An ex-friend said he was arrested for drunken disorderly.

 

An old army comrade said her father threw himself off a bridge.

 

It was hard to wade through the truths and the lies, like Rey was walking through sticky molasses, but she followed each lead regardless, each time stepping closer and closer to her father, and each time Leia dropped her to the airport, or outside a stranger’s house, she said the same thing - _“bring him home.”_

 

It was a distant relative, some cousin-of-a-cousin that told Rey about the Welsh fishing town. A small village, a population of a couple of thousand, enclosed in rocky hills that stretched into the sky and was always plagued by grey clouds. Leia was staying in Cardiff, while Rey journeyed. She left Rey on the bus to the countryside with a kiss on the forehead and a quiet _“bring him home.”_

 

Rey braved the rickety boat, the murderous, thrashing water and the thundering storm above her head for him. She was too close now, so close she could imagine him, arms wide open to greet her as she found peace for the first time since she was four years old.

 

***

 

“I’m your daughter.”

 

Luke, her _father_ , in the flesh, stood before her, illuminated in the pale glow. She was certain he was a mirage, that in any second, he would disappear again, leaving a stranger in his spot. Her heart beat like a hummingbird in the cage of her ribs, and blood thumped a staccato rhythm in her ears.

 

Her father didn’t dissolve.

 

He smiled, a warming, luminous grin that dried the rain off her bones, “ _Rey!”_

 

Her father stepped aside and opened the creaky door, beckoning her into the golden light.

**Author's Note:**

> for @randomfatechidna, who didn't actually do anything but i love her
> 
> song: Heirloom - Sleeping At Last
> 
> hmu on tumblr: http://atcmix.tumblr.com/


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